Friday, May 30, 2014

With the dust now settled on the Euro-elections, let’s take a look at
who will be speaking for Wessex
in Brussels and Strasbourg.Well, not just Wessex.We have 16 MEPs, 6 of them shared with
Cornwall and the other 10 shared with just a few of the more peripheral parts
of the Londonian region.

In terms of share of the electorate, ‘none of the above’ were the
runaway winners.There’s been the usual
snotty whining from the Left about non-voters failing to plump for the least
worst option and so letting UKIP in.The
London cartel
are all in favour of greater turnout just as long as they benefit.They’re not in favour of re-writing electoral
law to remove the barriers to smaller, alternative parties getting a foot in
the door.

So much for votes, what about the seats?We have 6 UKIP MEPs (including Nigel Farage), 5 Tories, 2 Labour, 2
Greens, and the one surviving FibDem.Among those not retaining their seats this time was Sir Graham Watson,
the ‘Southwest’ FibDem most memorable for thinking that Wessex is another name for Dorset.(So clearly no great loss.)Compare these results with 2009, when we had
4 UKIP, 7 Tories, 3 FibDems, and one each for Labour and the Greens.

The media frenzy has focused on UKIP’s gains.Most unfairly.The hard core of Euroscepticism has run at
about 25% for the past 40 years, so all that the results achieve is to give it
unmistakeable party political expression for the first time.The pro-EU bloc won the election, both within
the UK and across Europe generally.The Tories are only upset because they didn’t do it
single-handedly.Be assured, come next
May’s Westminster election the protest votes will return to the Tory fold as
quickly as you can say ‘oh no, Labour government ahead’.

Which may be true.But that’s not
to say that a protest vote can be dismissed as such.The fact that life-long Tories can cast a
protest vote at all is bound to chill the air at Tory Central Office.In Wessex the UKIP vote leapt by 10
percentage points in ‘The South West’ and 13 points in ‘The South East’, in
both areas passing 32% of votes cast. (Within Wessex,
district by district, UKIP did best in the far west and the far south, the
areas of more restricted prosperity.)

Why?Black propaganda, of
course.Regulations for straight bananas
and all that.But also a refusal to open
up European politics to the possibility of reform.Of the major London parties, only the Greens really
attempted to get that debate moving.The
other contenders appear locked in the Punch-and-Judy-show politics that views
the EU as either the Fourth Reich or as a set of sacred texts, without which
the sky would fall.(Nick Clegg went so
far as to say that the EU in ten years’ time will be like the EU today, which
is hardly a stirring vision.)Even David
Cameron can get things right sometimes, more by accident than by design, but in
questioning the doctrine of ‘ever closer union’ he has both hit on the truth
and made many enemies among an unthinking elite of continental politicians.

The commitment to ‘ever closer union’, however much sense it made in the
1950s, has outlived its usefulness.Either it goes or Europe will
fail.Either it is to be interpreted
literally – as an unalterable trajectory towards a European unitary state whose
regions have no power to choose their own destinies in isolation – or it is
meaningless waffle of which we need have no fear.It isn’t satisfactory that it hangs in the
balance, either as something very sinister indeed or as really nothing at
all.Whichever it is, it has become the
greatest obstacle to reasoned discussion on the future of Europe
because it mandates, in theory even when not in practice, a one-way street from
which there is no escape.We should not consider
ourselves bound by this dictatorship of the dead.

The EU wields huge judicial and financial power, but ultimately it all remains
delegated power.The judicial power
could be curtailed by amending section 3 of the European Communities Act 1972
to make European Court
rulings advisory rather than binding.The financial power?Stop sending
the money.If the EU is worth 1% of what
it claims, send 1%.

It’s always been assumed that such things are impossible because of the
diplomatic storm they would generate.But a more Eurosceptic Europe creates an environment in which such
storms are more easily weathered.No-one
is going to be expelled for unilaterally re-writing treaties that no longer
work; others don’t always believe in ‘my word is my bond’.Someone has to do the job of reforming Europe and it may as well start here.Let the rest catch up when they’re
ready.In every way, a two-speed Europe: one stuck in the centralist past, the other
forging ahead into a largely decentralist future.

Eurosceptics generally assume that you can only be ‘in’ or ‘out’ because
they WANT to see the world in such stark terms, ones that re-inforce their own
ideas about nation-state sovereignty versus regional and local autonomy.The realpolitik is a lot more complex than
that and will probably get a lot more so.Europe is already many different Europes
– the Council of Europe, the EU, the eurozone, Schengenland, etc – and no-one
but a Jacobin would get upset over that.A focus on pragmatism rather than uniformity might actually deliver some
surprises.Would the euro be a stronger
currency if backed by the combined strength of Germany
AND the UK?Is the debate over whether economic union or
political union is more important actually the wrong debate?Should we look to cultural union instead, a
celebration of Europe’s Graeco-Roman,
Judaeo-Christian and Enlightenment heritage?Would that create more opportunities for small nations and historic
regions, as the practical bedrock of that pan-European culture, one long divided
by centuries of war, imperialism and stereotypical mistrust?

Overt Euroscepticism has been on the rise not only in the UK but elsewhere
across the EU.As the UK has turned to UKIP, so France has turned to the Front National, which
has condemned the EU for its failure to protect Europe
from globalisation and, indeed, for being complicit in rolling it out.The Left appear not to have any credible analysis
of what’s going on (because they have no long-term historical memory), so let’s
take a look at what the Right have been up to (because they do).

Guillaume Faye is a prominent thinker of the French New Right.As a politician, his opinions are usually
execrable.As a philosopher, his
theories are often challengeable.As a
prophet, he has an uncanny ability to be proved correct, so refusing to read
his work would be unwise.(Besides
which, it’s always good to know what political rivals are thinking.)Here he is, back in 2004, in Convergence of Catastrophes:

“European
institutions, and especially the European Commission, are not defending Europe,
but are destroying it…Here are some
points that underline this perverse trend:

1)By its directives,
the European Commission arrogates to itself the powers of the Council of
Ministers, completely illegally.Manipulated by ‘committees of experts’, it systematically corrodes and
undermines state sovereignties without replacing them with a federal political
sovereignty and without being checked by the rump Parliament in Strasbourg.The ‘Convention’ with Giscard d’Estaing as
its President will probably make things worse.The European Commission represents a technocratic despotism in a
chemically pure state that exists nowhere else in the world.

2)European
institutions flout the principle of subsidiarity and decentralisation and
practice, on the contrary, a fussy and aggravated Jacobin centralism.What business does Brussels have with the
labelling of products in France
or Italy, the procedures for
making cheese in Normandy,
or the maturing of oysters in Charental?Have the ‘regionalists’ who support the current European Union not
understood that the EU is in fact totally opposed to all regional autonomy?In the USA, the states have great latitude
in legislating in relevant areas – more so than European states!Recently, several German Länder (regions)
have noticed that the EU is eliminating the powers accorded them by the German
federal state.

3)In all matters,
the European Commission and the Parliament in Strasbourg are following a
political and ideological line totally contrary to the interests of Europe:
dogmatic global free trade, a low profile in the face of American commercial
injunctions, encouraging the use of English, open borders immigrationism and
militant Islamophilia and Holy Roller humanitarianism, matched by a total lack
of political or geopolitical vision for Europe, which is replaced by the
religious vulgate of human rights.

4)The expansion of
the EU without any preparation into central Europe (indeed, into Turkey as well)
will make whatever results unmanageable.And it will cost a lot of money.The countries that have applied for entry are first of all looking for
subventions.It is absurd to make
countries participate in the same economic and monetary unit when the ratio of
their standard of living is sometimes 1 to 5.On 1 January 2004, the EU will grow from 15 to 25 members.No one agrees on the size of the subventions
to offer them.A two-tier Europe will be established, and we shall see the unemployed
of ten new countries pour into the West.The ‘Convention’ with Giscard d’Estaing for its President has not made
and will not make any proposal to revise the EU’s institutions to accommodate
these new countries.

5)The initial
project of the Treaty of Rome to construct an economy that was to be
self-centred and protected over its large territory has been scandalously
diverted from its objective and has generated a Europe open to the four winds
as a result of immigration and the markets, whose currency is managed by no
political authority.The European Central
Bank of Frankfurt lets the euro fluctuate at
the will of the markets.The result is
that the European Union, stripped not only of its internal national boundaries,
but of its external frontiers as well, cannot claim that it is becoming a
‘federal state’.

We have the worst
alliance that can exist, combining ultra-liberalism and a subventionist and
dirigist bureaucracy, quite the reverse of what should have been done.Anyhow, if the USA has not been opposed to the
ambition of the European Union, there is a reason.This submissive, emasculated, headless
Europe, which scores goals against its own side, suits the USA
perfectly.When asked the question, ‘Are
you for or against the construction of the European Union?’ a high American
functionary answered, ‘In favour, as long as it does not work.’”

The indictment is all too familiar, and has rarely been more boldly
stated.The case for the defence is founded
in fear of the unknown, of the not-the-same-as-now, so don’t you dare.Not in a positive rebuttal of the charge that
the EU works for the destruction of all that variety of little things that make
Europe Europe.Après nous, le déluge.The
EU goes on gorging itself on the emotional capital of 1945 and the argument is
wearing thin.No wonder the parties
viewed as the most anti-establishment are the parties picking up votes.The Right in Denmark,
France and the UK, the ‘alternatives’ in Spain, and both far Left and far Right in Greece.

In the UK,
there could have been a real debate at the heart of this month’s
elections.Instead, for the next five
years, the party of ‘Out’ has staked its claim to provide the sound and fury,
signifying nothing.The party of ‘In’
appears to have shuffled off this mortal coil, while power remains with the closed-ranks
parties of ‘Am I Bothered?’The parties
of ‘Europe – But Not This Europe’ remain
shoved to the margins in all but a few countries.

We are told, over and over, that the UKIP fire is the only alternative
to the Brussels
frying-pan, and vice versa.It isn’t
true – and that’s a point that needs to be argued a lot more loudly in future.The EU will bend or it will break.It’s time for the tired old defenders of Europe and Britain alike to give way to a more flexible view.

Sunday, May 25, 2014

News reaches us of a groundbreaking initiative by Wessex
Society, the cultural association devoted to promoting our region’s
identity.To mark St Ealdhelm’s Day,
which falls today, the Society offered Wyvern flags to all the county and unitary
authorities in Wessex
to fly outside their offices.

There has been a good take-up from county councils – Dorset,
Isle of Wight, Somerset, Wiltshire – and some of the unitary districts – the
Borough of Bournemouth, the City & County of Bristol, South Gloucestershire
(who have two offices and so requested two flags), and the Royal Borough of
Windsor & Maidenhead.Six of our
eight shires are therefore included.Wyvern flags are also flown, or have been flown recently, by the town councils
in Wantage and Weston-super-Mare and at Oxford
Castle and Winchester University.
Today’s omissions are mainly around the
peripheries, where identity could be expected to be weaker, so give them time,
but what happened to Hampshire County Council?Are they trying to tell us that Winchester
isn’t in Wessex?How stupid do they want to look?

We are also told that Eric Pickles’ Department for
Communities & Local Government planned to fly the Wyvern again this year
outside their London
headquarters but discovered, too late, that they had mislaid the flag.You can just imagine what Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It would make of that.

While the political niche we fill is necessarily a narrow
one – at this stage in the development of Wessex consciousness – the success of
Wessex Society’s initiative should now silence those who insist that Wessex
doesn’t exist at all and that there is no wider sense of identity into which a
Wessex political movement can potentially tap.

What the initiative also reveals is where the real threat to
Wessex
lies.Positive responses were received
from half the county councils but only a quarter of the unitary districts.Many unitaries are urban and three of them
are controlled by Labour.The overall
response rate across Wessex
was 33%; the response rate from Labour-run councils was precisely nil.Nothing from Plymouth
or Reading, while Southampton
just dithered indefinitely.

Why? The Labour
movement is happy to come to Tolpuddle once a year; the RMT union’s Wessex
branch even takes part with a gurt big wyvern on its banner.Labour in government did nothing to lift the
ban on our flag, leaving it to Eric Pickles to restore our freedom to fly.But that’s history now.Surely they’ve moved on?So why the sour-faced refusal to join in the
fun today?Would Labour refuse to fly
the Welsh dragon or the Scottish saltire in their respective home territories?

Or has some directive gone out from London
that the boundaries of the Prescott zones are
never, ever to be questioned, even in the interests of promoting a real
regional identity capable of mobilising support for devolution across a
significant chunk of the south of England?Tell us, please, why DOES Labour hate Wessex so much?

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Wessex
Electricity, Wessex Trains, Wessex
Water.All run by managements located solely in Wessex.All democratically accountable to a Wessex
Witan.Interfering London lawmakers and exploitative global finance
just a fading memory of less pleasant times.

We can dream.And why
not?A poll last autumn showed that two-thirds of the public – including some Tories – want to see public services taken back into public ownership.One thing that transport and the utilities all have in common is a regional structure, so why not group them under regional assemblies?There has
always been a huge potential synergy between the case for devolution and the
case for renewed public ownership.The
region – and its small nation equivalents – is the appropriate scale at which to
rebuild our damaged democratic society.

What are the options?

Option 1 is a Labour government, scared of the City of London, that ignores
public opinion, takes nothing into public ownership and – if past Labour
governments are anything to go by – only speeds up the re-organisation of public
services into foreign-owned profit centres.

Option 2 is a Labour government that attempts to re-run the
1940s, perhaps as part of a plan to re-invigorate 'the nation' in the aftermath of a 'No' vote in Scotland.Services are re-nationalised but
under monolithic British or Englandandwales corporations run from London.Regional boards or offices, if they exist,
are not really autonomous, their areas don’t match those used by other services
and the folk they serve have no say over them except via Westminster
and Whitehall.

Option 3 is a government, of any description, that devolves
power to Wessex.It’s the scenario described in the opening
lines above.

Options 1 and 2 are real possibilities, 1 far more so than 2.Option 3 is nothing but pure fantasy, if we
expect Labour to deliver it.Like it or
not, the only way it will be delivered is through the Wessex Regionalist Party.That will take time, of course, but no other
way is possible. (Prove us wrong!)

Postal ballot papers for the Euros have started to arrive,
allowing some of us to see what ‘choice’, if any, the 'democratic' process has
thrown up this time.

Although WR has contested European elections in the past,
this was when the constituencies were smaller, single-member ones that did less
damage to regional identity.We have no
candidates this time, having been systematically disadvantaged both
geographically and financially.

The geography doesn’t help because the ‘regions’ used for
the regional constituencies are still the (supposedly abolished) Prescott zones, not real
regions with historic identities.Wessex is split between two, the west added to Cornwall, the east
embraced by the outer Londonian belt.

To contest two ‘regions’ would cost £10,000 in deposits
before even a single leaflet could roll off the presses.The election deposit is essentially a tax on
smaller parties.You get the money back
if you poll more than 2.5% – but while you’re building up that support you’re
repeatedly punished for having the nerve to challenge the established cartel.

Surely it would be worth it to get a party election
broadcast though?If only.Stand in Scotland
or Wales
and you get your airtime even if you stand nowhere else.Stand in one English ‘region’, or even two,
and you don’t get a thing.To qualify,
you have to stand in all nine English ‘regions’.

That’s nonsense, of course.It dismisses the whole point of a regional party.Our audience is in Wessex,
not Northumbria or East Anglia.As Scotland
and Wales show, there’s no
technical reason why it can’t be done, since broadcasting in England still
has a regional basis.It’s pure
ideological spite on the part of the London
regime: a refusal to facilitate debate about the future of England, insisting that we are One
– and that THEY are that One.

It would be possible to get round the rules by having some
sort of ‘English regionalist list’, but why should it come to that?It’s clearly not our business to stir up other
parts of England
that aren’t interested in rousing themselves.And there’s no ‘Celtic nationalist list’, for good reason: the Celtic
nations are all different, with different priorities.And so are the English regions.One thing we don’t want to do is play down
our differences at the very point where proper constitutional accommodation of
those differences is coming to be recognised as the real alternative to a
dysfunctional UK dominated
by London.

So you’re a Wessex Regionalist.There’s no WR candidate.Can you vote for any of the others?Last time, in 2009, there was a Mebyon Kernow
list in ‘The South West’, but that was a one-off.MK were fortunate enough to find the funds to
fight.Despite polling 6.8% in Cornwall, they still lost their deposit because they
weren’t so popular outside Cornwall.Hardly surprising.But hardly fair.In the absence of both WR and MK, what about
the Greens then?Well, what about the
Greens?

The Greens are not regionalists.They may talk about ‘small is beautiful’ but
they don’t practise it, preferring to remain organised as ‘the Green Party of
England & Wales’ and putting up candidates against nationalists and
regionalists whose policies are actually far more green than the Green Party’s.(The Greens, for example, favour
renationalisation of the railways, not the decentralised common ownership that
is needed but simply a return to the catastrophe of micro-management from
London, meaning London’s demands get priority treatment every time.)

Recently, the Green Party leader, Natalie Bennett, was
spotted in Cornwall
lending support to the campaign for an assembly there (rather as the FibDems
did, long ago).The Greens’ No 2
candidate for ‘The South West’, Emily McIvor, has a positive record on
devolutionary issues.But if you do vote
Green, you won’t get Emily.

If the Greens are lucky, they will win one seat in ‘The
South West’.It would take a landslide
to win two.Which means that a vote for
the Greens is not a vote for Emily but for the No 1 candidate, Molly Scott
Cato, who currently leads the Green Group on Stroud District Council (but works in London).And has a past.

In 1992, Cynog Dafis was elected as Plaid Cymru MP for
Ceredigion & Pembroke North, with Green Party support.The
deal worked well enough for most members in both local parties, the Greens
recognising that half an MP is better than no representation.Not so Molly Scott Cato, who was one of the
pact saboteurs who worked to break it.An exasperated Dafis eventually withdrew from the deal, leaving the
Greens with no presence in the House of Commons until the election of Caroline
Lucas in 2010.

On his own website, Cato’s former partner, Chris Busby, explains
the anti-pact campaign as motivated by a belief that the Blaid as a whole wasn’t
green enough, on issues such as nuclear power or travellers’ rights.However, a pamphlet co-authored by Busby, Cato
and others in 1995, Nationalism in Wales,
exposed the real agenda as one hostile to any way of thinking that failed to
match their arrogant metropolitan prejudices.(An example: they defined nationalism in Wales not empirically but by
reference to selected dictionary definitions that enabled them to conflate it
with Nazism.Facts were not allowed to
spoil their argument: the nationalists, obviously, were just concealing their
true nature.)Cato, settling in a
community where Welsh was the normal medium of communication (and had been for
many, many centuries), refused to learn the language and then complained of
being lonely.Given this track record,
it is difficult to see her championing the cause of regional autonomy or
cultural identity.More a case of ‘save
the world but sod the locals’.

Greens and regionalists share much in policy terms – and sit
together in the European Parliament.But
they come to the same policies from very different starting points that must
influence how those policies are understood and applied.

Greens appear to have no concept of history,
of being one part of a continuing local or regional story set in linear time
and from which it is possible to learn useful things about the nature of the
area.Including its ecological nature.According to Simon Schama, “Green politics is sited in the present and the
future, with only the very remote past (at least in Europe)
invoked as a sacred ancestor.”This
fits well the tired, post-war narrative of suppression that views all
Europeans as incapable of making healthy use of their heritage.(Interestingly, the intervening millennia of experience judged illegitimate are those not shared with the USA.) The Greens, given their oft-alleged far-Right
origins, are more sensitive than most to such accusations and therefore all the
more keen to throw mud proactively.

Molly Scott Cato remains a fervent advocate of bio-regionalism, a neo-Jacobin project to erase all historic human communities
and replace them with new identities defined solely by objective geographical
resources.For the Greens, ordinary humans
are the problem, so their varied cultures obviously cannot be allowed to shape
the universal solution.Regionalism it may
be, but not as we know it.The question
of power remains absent, especially the question of power projected from
without.Greens can be easily
caricatured as those who have come to a community with the deliberate aim of
undermining the sense of difference that attracted them in the first place, once
that sense of difference demands anything of them in return.Sometimes the caricature is really quite
fair.

We have to conclude that there is no party standing in the
Euro-elections in Wessex
that we can support sufficiently to recommend a vote in its favour.All to some extent oppose Wessex and desire its continued destruction by the London regime. There is nothing concrete to suggest otherwise and therefore nothing to be gained by voting.

So you’re a Wessex Regionalist.What do you do?What you can do is the following (modified as
necessary if yours is a postal vote).Take a thick felt pen to the polling station.Spread out the ballot paper.Write WESSEX REGIONALIST across it.Fold it, and place it in the ballot box.Those supervising the count will notice such
things: the papers end up in a separate pile.Let’s aim for a record number of spoilt papers.A wasted vote?No.A
negative action?Far from it.Under the current electoral system, anti-democratic and centralist to the core, it is the only positive step we are
allowed to take.

Monday, May 12, 2014

“The slightly
eccentric Wessex
regionalists have been around for a while but tend to be backward-looking and
potentially reactionary.”

So writes Professor Paul Salveson in his online newsletter, Salvo.It’s always good to see
regionalism recognised, but it’s simply sloppy to misrepresent us.

We’d prefer to describe ourselves as more than usually
different, and refreshingly so. Has the
prof read any of our recent stuff? Pro-rail,
conscious of Peak Oil, with no time for any of the London-obsessed dinosaur
parties. Far more forward-looking in
fact than any of the alternatives. Wessex is about the future; it’s the UK –
with its silly wartime compass-point regions and utter paranoia about any
identity but its own – that is stuck in the past. All politics is ‘potentially reactionary’ – we
don’t listen to lectures from New Labour on that – but it’s up to those of
goodwill to work together to ensure it stays true to sound ideals.

Should we post the above response on the prof’s page perhaps?Already done.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Channel 4’s Jon Snow is back from Scotland with his eyes opened: see
his blog on the subject, and the many comments it’s attracted.To sum up, London
is loathed from Land’s End to John O’Groats.Westminster
politicians are vicious and corrupt; City slickers are the downfall of a decent
society; the meejah couldn’t care less about anything beyond the M25.

It’s a narrative that is gaining traction and hurrah for that.While England ponders whether to use UKIP
to hit back at the disappointers, Scottish voters are wondering if Salmond
might just triumph this September.It would
be such a way to make a point.What’s
more, it’s one we could all share in.Scotland’s freedom is something to be celebrated
wildly by everyone who hates the London
system.The rest-of-the-UK would
self-evidently be on Death Row, presenting unprecedented opportunities for all
who have even a partly articulated vision of how their own nations and regions
should be governed once the Augean stables have been cleansed.Dangerous times perhaps, but perhaps immensely
rewarding ones too.

Then there’s the possibility of a ‘No’ vote.No-one knows what it means.Is it a vote for the status quo or not?What might be promised in the run-up to the poll
as a sweetener, if independence takes the lead?Which is more the leap into the unknown, ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?

Either way, enjoy what could be the last few months of normal British politics.You’d never believe there’s a UK-wide general
election due twelve months on from today; think that one through and the West Lothian Question is child's play in comparison.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Until 1948, the electricity supply in Bristol, as in many towns,
was run as a council department, with its own power stations at Temple Back,
Avonbank and Portishead.In that year it
was effectively confiscated by the London
regime, without payment of full compensation, only to be sold on in 1990 as
part of South Western Electricity, which is now owned by the French Government.

Now it emerges that Bristol
is one of a group of cities looking to re-enter the energy market, working
alongside the Bristol-based Ovo Energy, one of the smaller suppliers offering
an alternative to the Big Six.This is precisely what is needed in a world where so many alternatives
to shameless profiteering have been closed off by the totalitarian liberals who
dominate all three main London
parties.

Does it go far enough?Not
yet.Locally-managed power can be a real
boost to more sustainable cities, integrated with urban heat networks,
micro-renewables, smart metering and energy-from-waste.And certainly not forgetting everything that
needs doing to reduce demand through improved energy saving.City and borough councils are as well placed
today as in the 19th century to organise a more efficient energy distribution
system.The reason they got involved in securing
local monopolies – in electricity, gas, trams, water, and even telephones – was
because all these things involve digging up the streets; a little co-ordination
avoids a great deal of inconvenience.As
we move inevitably towards an energy-poor economy, a well thought out strategy
for making the most of what we have will make the difference between those
cities that have a future and those that don’t.

Monday, May 5, 2014

Not a working day goes by without London
interference in local decision-making.What makes the UK such a desolate place to live is that this
interference is so widely accepted, at best as something that cannot be
changed, at worst as something entirely natural, a system under which London
provides ‘leadership’ for a grateful nation.

It is, ultimately, an assault upon democracy.Because if locally elected representatives
cannot be trusted to make the correct decisions, and regionally elected ones
are dismissed as more of the same, how is it that nationally or internationally
elected representatives suddenly acquire the wisdom to do things so much
better?Or is it just that they are more
easily swayed by the moneybags, and by the high life in London
or Brussels?

Is it the schools that ministers and their civil servants come from that
give them the assumed right to overturn the supposedly narrow judgments of parish
and shire?Not always.Labour ministers, even those that come from
the comprehensives, are actually far more contemptuous of local choice.Theirs is the legacy of vanguardism, Lenin’s
idea that the working class are too thick not to have rings run round them and
so need the protection of a party elite.Hence, for example, Labour’s opposition to proportional
representation.Bugger democracy, let’s
get the Labour man (or woman) in.From
its Jacobin and Christian Socialist traditions, Labour has also inherited the
idea that everyone is equal, and therefore that difference cannot be tolerated.The One True Answer is to be imposed
nationally through centralism and ideally through a globalised tyranny.Labour’s refusal to take issue with
multi-national capitalism is entirely explicable in terms of its desire to break
down borders and eliminate diversity.

Regardless of party, the London
machine is dismissive of ‘Lilliputian’ local concerns.It has an empire to run.Yet cannot see that its own concerns are Lilliputian
in global terms.It’s a paradox for
which it will heartily die in a ditch.No foreigner may tell Britannia what to do.But Britannia’s trident may poke each and
every peasant who isn’t on-message.

There is a long-established view that ‘the Army is the State’, and
therefore that states, in return for maintaining external security, have the
right to demand internal subservience.It’s a doctrine that has no place in a real democracy, where the
government serves the citizens and not the other way round.And yet it lingers.The idea of military conflict, or even a
fundamental economic disagreement, with France
or Germany
is now unthinkable.Despite this, we are
still ruled by a class of classicists who see it as their job to maintain the
balance of power within Europe and to make
whatever mischief is necessary to achieve this.Talent being lost from London to
Frankfurt or Geneva
is a national crisis.Talent being lost
from Newcastle or Plymouth
to London is
not.

Desperate unionists recently launched the ‘No Borders’ campaign to stop the UK
‘sleepwalking into separation’.It’s
certainly a canny choice of name, appealing to all that imaginative generation
of hippies who know their John Lennon.The problem is that a world without borders is not a world without
orders.Somewhere in the borderless
society resides the power to make decisions.Borders between countries – and boundaries between regions, shires and
parishes – are what prevent that power gravitating to one point.The Left didn’t listen; they insisted it was all about class and not really about geography.And what they got was Stalin and Mao.The Right didn’t listen; they insisted it was all about individual
enterprise and not really about the freedom of vast, often inherited wealth to
flee where it pleases.

Lines on maps often appear arbitrary, and sometimes are.But without them, there is no escape from
either arbitrary government or arbitrary finance, or possibly both, as a
corporatist cocktail.That is why we
need many more lines on maps, and why they need to mean more, both in practical
terms and within the ideologies that defend them.

Borders get a bad press that associates them with chauvinism and racism.
Really? You may as well refuse to drive a car
because it might, just might, crash and kill somebody.You can have borders and still have free
movement across them: how liberal or restrictive an immigration policy should
be is a matter of day-to-day politics, not necessarily something enshrined in the constitution.Without borders, you don’t have the choice of
making a choice.There is a positive
narrative to be championed about borders and boundaries, about how they secure
freedom and democracy by excluding outside interference in the life of the community.For that narrative to be free of hypocrisy,
it is not enough to champion borders alone.The boundaries that define local and regional autonomy are still more
worthy of respect because it is within such communities that democratic values
are learned and treasured.Reduce democracy
to a mass that benefits the big battalions, where there is no real debate and
only the viral trending of donor-sponsored soundbites, and it ceases to be democracy.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Last week, the London
regime finally bowed to pressure to recognise the Cornish as a national
minority under the relevant Council of Europe agreement.Or tried to, not very hard.The official press release talks about having
to ‘modify’ the application of the European convention to accommodate the idea
of a national minority – the Cornish – existing, on their home ground, within
some other nation’s territory – England.It’s an unsustainable solution that defies
the logic of language – the cornu-wealas
are the Welsh of the far west and thus their land
of Cornwall, by definition, cannot be
part of a modern England
that doesn’t invite itself to be denounced as imperialist.

Cornwall’s achievement
attracted huge goodwill from many quarters, tinged with sadness that several of
those who fought most tenaciously for it died in recent months without seeing
their life’s work crowned with success.Others, for some reason, seemed aggrieved, as if their own lives are diminished
by joys they do not comprehend.‘Cornwall is NOT a
country.End of.’Well, no, start of, actually.Recognition will now be the thin end of a
wedge to be driven as a stake into the centralist heart.

Are we next in line?Cornwall now joins Scotland
as evidence that the tectonic plates of UK constitutional politics are on
the move.The idea that recognising the Cornish is some clever gambit to see off Scottish independence, showing how a multi-nation UK can exist successfully, is one that spectacularly misses the point. Concessions are accumulating precisely because the UK doesn't work and because that fact is being grasped ever more widely. Channel 4 even produced a map,
with a bizarre interpretation of Wessex
that managed to exclude both Wantage and Winchester.The Southern
Daily Echo grabbed a few quotes, then took them out of context to fit the
already-written headline. For now, the hacks are getting it a bit muddled, in a sometimes comical way. It's all new to them, this freedom thing. Come to this blog if you want a proper explanation.

Wessex is a region.It’s not a nation and so cannot benefit
directly from ideas about national minority status.That’s not to say though that we can’t manage
our own affairs as well as any Celtic nation can manage theirs.Better government is better government,
whatever you call the area governed.So
in that sense, we hope very much that Cornwall will hold the door open, first
for the recognition from above that we exist and that our existence entitles us
to fair treatment, then for the recognition from below that, at the end of the day, we
need recognition from no-one, just the self-will to cast off the deadening London
yoke.

As the implications of the Heartbleed bug continue to be revealed, it
becomes clear that while a digital society, including a digital economy and
digital government, delivers many benefits, many of these are exceedingly
fragile.Two items from the press last
month further illustrate the point.

The first is from Metro, which
reported on the launch of the London
regime’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-UK), tasked with fighting cyber
attacks of national significance.Cyber-security doesn’t come cheap and is never 100% guaranteed.Scenario-writers are increasingly
highlighting the threat that hackers pose to the operation of vital
infrastructure, particularly where manual back-up has been scaled-down for
reasons of cost-cutting.

On the same day as the Metro
story, the London
Evening Standard ran with a report on
HFT – high-frequency trading – in short, the use of computer algorithms to
drive stock markets.So intense is the
competition that even the use of microwave radio rather than cables to send the
signal can shave off the crucial nanoseconds needed to close a deal.Machines don’t think, so while the
alternating euphoria and panic of the market are self-correcting with human
intervention, they can easily get out of control in its absence.

The article was written by James Rickards, author of The Death of Money – The Coming Collapse of
the International Monetary System.It takes the form of a review of work by another financial journalist,
Michael Lewis, author of Flash Boys.Rickards is no optimist:

“The gross
notional value of derivatives of all kinds owed by banks is already greater
than 100 per cent of global GDP.Complexity theory tells us that the worst catastrophe that can occur in
a system is an exponential function of the scale of the system.This means that when you double the system
scale, you increase systemic risk by a factor of 10 or more…The collapse is already on its way but HFT
will make it bigger, faster and impossible to stop.The solution is to ban HFT and most other
derivatives.Don’t expect that to
happen.Instead, get ready for the
avalanche.”

So, what does this mean for Wessex?

Firstly, that the free market is about to eat itself.All that deregulation, explained away as promoting
beneficial economies of scale, is revealed as the piling-up of system
instability through removing barriers to growth.Barriers to growth are an essential part of a
sane, self-governing society that is not at the mercy of unaccountable forces.They are unfair only in the sense that having
a skin is unfair to diseases.

Secondly, that, since the UK
is, politically-speaking, owned by the City of London and regularly robbed by it, reform driven
from above is impossible.Only the
building of a resilient regional alternative makes any sense.

Thirdly, that progress towards building such an alternative needs to be
stepped up.That includes demanding, ceaselessly,
the return of our taxes from London,
to be spent in future on local and regional priorities.In Sweden, 36% of the tax take is
raised and spent locally and regionally.In federal Germany,
the figure is 29%.The OECD average is
26%.The UK figure?5%.Our
paranoid Norman rulers still don’t allow us even to have a regional tier in the
first place.